


Unfit to Be Strangers

by scioscribe



Category: The Leftovers
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mild Magical Realism, Post-Apocalypse, Religion, The 2 Percent World, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-15 07:49:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16929306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: They're all alone together.





	Unfit to Be Strangers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



_WE ARE OUT OF BAD LUCK._

Arjun saw the flyer when he was in the grocery store.  It was printed on fluorescent lime paper and pinned up on the bulletin board alongside all the other tackily homemade announcements and pleas.   _Have You Seen This Dog?  His name is RUFUS.  Black lab, six years old.  Belonged to my brother Andrew Voigt (Lost)._ The person wanting to claim Rufus had sprung for color printing, which was hard to come by these days.  It didn’t make sense, not when the dog was black anyway.  A flyer with tear-away strips at the bottom was from someone seeking housemates, preferably ones who knew something about organic farming.  Some church was offering shelter to any Deadliners.  Somebody was offering to mow lawns.

The proclamation about luck—Arjun couldn’t decide if it was sunny or ominous—was on the far left.  It was held in place with pink push pins.

Arjun had paused in the middle of handing over his groceries to be wearily accounted for: his hand seemed stuck on a Saran-wrapped loaf of bread.

The owner, Mrs. Edmonds, crooked her fingers at him and Arjun heard the low and crinkly sound of her joints popping.  “What is it?” she said without turning around to look behind her.  “That lucky one?”

“Yes.  Sorry.”  He surrendered the bread.

She tapped its price into her adding machine.  “It’s been getting people all day.”

“Who brought it in?”

“I couldn’t tell you.  Everyone who uses the board gets confidentiality.”  She presented him with the totaled receipt and began sliding his purchases into the cloth tote he’d brought with him.  She bagged carefully, cans and jars and tins at the bottom.

“Really?”

She laughed a smoke-roughened laugh.  “No, son, of course not.  I just wasn’t looking whenever it got put up.”

Arjun pocketed the receipt.  Nothing cost anything anymore, at least not within Darien itself: there wasn’t any point when there were so few people there and they all depended so much on each other.  Money had been replaced by a network of memory and obligation and social pressure.  Mrs. Edmonds tallied things up out of habit and he’d given up on reminding her to stop.  There was something reassuring about having a written record, anyway.

“How are the little ones?” she asked.

She meant the Houston-Chen kids, Ezra and Mina.  Arjun lived with them and their moms, the house now unnaturally crowded about them, like a shirt that had gotten too tight at the shoulders.  He couldn’t make himself leave.

“Ezra’s learning the clarinet.”  He knew by now how to deliver the report dispassionately, with no hint that it reminded him of answering his own parents’ questions— _Did you get your brother to bed on time?  Was he picky about dinner or did he clean his plate for once?  Did your sister call?  Is she still dating that terrible boy, you know the one, with the bangs?_ “He’s not too bad for his age.  We nailed a bunch of quilts to the walls of the shed so he has a soundproofed place to practice, though, because the noise gives Mina fits.  She’s fine outside of that—she’s starting on chapter-books now.”

“Isn’t that something,” Mrs. Edmonds said.

Arjun looked again at that flyer.  “Yes,” he agreed politely.

* * *

 At the moment of Loss, Arjun was upstairs.  His father, mother, and younger brother were in the kitchen almost directly underneath his feet; his older sister was at Princeton.

His mother was scrambling eggs—scrambled eggs were one of the only things his picky, delicate-stomached younger brother, Neil, would eat without a half-hour of sulky argument.  He could hear her arguing with his father—whenever they went at it, they both dipped into Hindi, as if Neil wouldn’t understand they were fighting if he couldn’t understand the actual words.  Arjun couldn’t follow all of it himself, especially not through the floor, but he knew without really listening that it was the same old fight.  His job was unethical.  She was naive.  He had promised to leave corporate law once the children were grown.  Didn’t she realize that the boys still had college?  Oh, did he not think her children would merit scholarships on their own?  And they had savings, didn’t they?  Why should Arjun—with his marijuana (she always said it so precisely) and his iPhone full of pornography of men (also always precise)—be sent to school with money made on the backs of slaves?  She was being too dramatic—always so dramatic.  The companies he represented were not so terrible.  And anyway, had she noticed what their life cost?  Did she have the slightest idea?

Then his father would start naming prices—pulling them out of his ass, Arjun thought, looking around the kitchen and shouting out numbers like he really remembered what the stove had cost, let alone the fruit bowl, let alone the napkin rings.

He missed Deepika, who would have made it all funny somehow.  She would have waggled her eyebrows along with their father’s rants, Groucho Marx perfectly reimagined as an Indian girl with a long, swinging braid and metallic eyeliner.  “Ah,” she would have said in her I’ve-got-you-now parody of Baba’s voice, “but Arjun will not always have one hand stuck down his pants, my love, he will not always be going through a box of Kleenex each week.  His breath will not always smell of bongwater.  No, someday he will make us proud.  He is a good boy at heart—he will stop having fun.”

He pulled on his socks slowly.  He inhaled the scent of eggs and frying chicken sausage.  No—

No, the argument had gone completely silent.

And he could smell something beginning to burn.

* * *

 

Arjun brought the groceries home.  Susan was the only one there—she had cleared off the kitchen table and was painting its surface with eye-gougingly bright acrylics.

“It’s an abstract family portrait.”  She rested her paintbrush in its little blue Solo cup of water and came over to help him unpack; she had gotten a freckle of green just above her upper lip.  She had some kind of echolocation for where everything was supposed to go and where it would fit, and after a moment he just stepped back and watched her.  She raised up on her toes to put away the coffee.

“Where is everybody?” Arjun said, since he didn’t want to talk about the family portrait—whether he was in it or not, whether any of them, him included, wanted him to be.

He loved this cramped little house with its plastic placemats and its stained carpets.  But it made him sick that he loved Susan and Elizabeth and Ezra and Mina more constantly, more tenderly, than he’d loved his own family; it felt like betrayal to lose his complacency.

“Elizabeth took the kids to the lake.  And—to put out flowers for Peter, I think.”

If she hadn’t had that little fleck of paint for contrast, he might not have noticed her blush.

Peter had been the third Houston-Chen child, the lost one.  Their only loss.

They were the only family around with that kind of luck.  Arjun had seen a man, naked from the waist down, once get down on his knees in an IHOP—the first restaurant in Darien to reopen, apparently—and press his lips to the upturned cuff of Susan’s jeans, to the canvas top of her sneaker.  Susan had just sat there stiffly and let him do it, like he was a doctor drawing blood, like the procedure had to be endured.  When the man had stood up, Arjun had seen that he had strawberry syrup on his shins now, matted to his blond, wiry leg hair.  His cock had been swinging around freely, small but weirdly dignified.

Their pancakes had been on the house.

The true believers always went for Susan over Elizabeth because the lost Peter had been Elizabeth’s genetic contribution; Ezra and Mina were biologically Susan’s.  These people were really into hard science right up to the point where they threw out the window to believe that loving Susan Chen enough would bring their own families back from the dead.

“I couldn’t do it,” Susan said.  She stood there holding a box of cereal—the last box of Coco Puffs Arjun had been able to find, Mina’s favorite.  Her fingers were curled in, one nail punched slightly through the cardboard.  He didn’t think she’d noticed.  “I couldn’t stand in front of my son’s grave and have someone try to touch my shoe because of how goddamn _lucky_ I am.”

“I know.”

“And the punishment for that is that I don’t get to see his grave at all.”  She shoved the cereal into the back of the cabinet and shrugged, as if to say, _But what am I supposed to do?_

* * *

 

He was fifteen on the Day of Loss.  The only survivor of his family.  He learned, gradually, to stop listing all the ones who were gone; he had to make himself stop after Mama and Baba and Deepika and Neil because otherwise he would never stop, he would go on naming grandmothers and cousins and second-cousins and great-uncles and there would be no end to it.  The last time he said all the names together was when he applied for Estrangement.  He wanted to receive that certificate in the sluggish, erratically delivered mail—he wanted a sheet of creamy, 100% cotton cardstock to validate his grief.  Make it official.

But he didn’t qualify, apparently.  His pain was too ordinary.

_Dear Mr. Reddy:_

_It is with great understanding and, paradoxically, great relief that I must decline your request to be listed as a member of our organization.  Estrangement is a profound devastation, and the meaning of devastation has regrettably changed.  Our members are the sole survivors of their families, yes, almost invariably, but also the sole survivors of their towns, their schools, and their professions.  You should find comfort in knowing that almost everyone around you shares your level of grief—you do not need special company.  We know, of course, that this response must seem minimizing, but…_

Arjun set the letter ablaze on the stove and then went out onto his front lawn and screamed himself hoarse.

“ _Those fuckers_!”  He had ashy streaks on his hands and the taste of salt at the back of his throat.  He was taking enormous, snotty breaths through his mouth, gulping in air like he was drowning.  “ _Those FUCKERS, they don’t know!  They don’t know!”_

His remaining neighbors—an elderly woman who chewed tobacco and a man who lived alone with his dog—had gravitated closer to him after the Loss, moving into the empty houses to either side.  They seemed ill-equipped to adopt him, which was fine by him, since he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be adopted, since he wouldn’t even allow himself, then, to be touched, but they had formed some kind of unofficial adult alliance to leave casseroles on his porch.  The man, who hadn’t ever introduced himself, sometimes let himself in through Arjun’s back gate and ran a push-mower across his lawn—the riding mower had gas, but he seemed to prefer the baking heat of the sun, the green spray of the grass, the sting of sweat on his face.  The elderly woman, Marjorie, had gotten the power back on.  She stole things for him, if it even counted as stealing anymore: she would show up at his door with piles of clothes with the tags still on, with bags of junk food.

Marjorie was the one who came out to meet him that night, her porch light clicking on to herald her arrival.  She shuffled out to him, still in her slippers in the dewy grass that had grown back up again, weedy and oddly beautiful, despite the man’s best efforts.  She spat a brown string of tobacco off to the side.

“Do you know what that does?” she says.  “Tobacco juice?  It kills pests, garden pests.”

“It kills you too,” Arjun said.  His voice was raspy.

“So?”

He had no real answer for that.

Marjorie wrapped her baggy chenille sweater around herself.  “I think,” she said, “that I’m going to get an evening gown.  Something I never could have afforded in a million years.  And a string of pearls.”

 _Good for you._ He shrugged.

“Ninety-eight percent,” Marjorie said contemplatively.  “Ninety-nine, maybe, when you take in everybody that got swept along with them in the plane crashes and the car pile-ups and the broken-down hospitals.”

“They said I’m not alone enough,” Arjun said.

“Those Estrangement people?”  She spat again.  “Fuck ’em.  We’re all alone enough.  You’ll be glad when you’re older that they didn’t take you—you’d be embarrassed by it one day if they had.”

Maybe.  He knew how Marjorie saw them—a coterie, a clique, people who had decided that, with almost no one left in the world, they still needed their factions and their specialness, they still needed to feel more personally aggrieved.  The competitive tragedians, she’d called them once, even knowing he had written to them.  She was right.  He knew that.  But he had wanted—had _needed_ —someone to step down from on high and tell him that what he felt was unique.  He’d needed someone to say, _The pains of your life have never been felt before._

In the morning, he went away.  He should have left some note for Marjorie, at least, and maybe even for the man whose name he still didn’t know, but he didn’t—and that was rude, he thought, his mother would be so ashamed of him, but it wasn’t impractical.  The whole point of the Estranged letter had been that these people around him understood him perfectly.  He had no need for special company, no need for explanations.

* * *

 In the end, he got Susan to come with him to the mosque.

The mosque had no imam and, whenever he was there, no one inside it at all.  If there were any other Muslims in Darien, they seemed to keep a different—and even more irreligious—schedule than he did.  But the water in the cistern was always fresh and cool, so he couldn’t have been as singular as he thought.

He washed his feet and hands, his arms, his head, his mouth, and his nose, the part he had always forgotten or left out when performing _wudu_ before the Loss—it had made him feel ridiculous.  In the smooth, echoing silence of the nearly empty mosque, it didn’t seem ridiculous.  The glide of water over his skin seemed to matter very much.  He lifted up his fingers and watched glossy, glittering drops fall off him like rain.

“Are you going to pray?” Susan asked him when he came out.

He patted himself dry with a towel.  The supply of cotton towels was diminishing—whoever refilled the cisterns apparently didn’t want to go so far as to spend their time doing laundry.  He wasn’t helping by never contributing and always just tossing his own in the corner.

“Arjun?”

“Sure,” he said, even though he hadn’t really thought about it.  But there were spare prayer mats.  He unfurled one and knelt down.

Susan watched him.  She hadn’t done _wudu_ herself—the paint was still on her face and fingers—and he didn’t know if that was because she didn’t want to or because the cisterns were only ever filled up on the men’s side.  He pictured her smearing dust on herself instead, leaving behind silvery tracks.

When he was done, he rolled the prayer mat up and said, “Maybe luck is relative.  Maybe that’s what they think.”

“I don’t care what they think,” she said.  There was no pause at all; she knew exactly what he was talking about.  “I care what you think.”

“You shouldn’t,” Arjun said.  “I’m an unemployed high school dropout freeloader who’s sleeping on your couch.”

“The couch folds out into a bed,” Susan said.  “It’s a bed.  Your bed.”

“Agree to disagree.”

“I care what you think,” she repeated.

“I don’t think grief’s relative,” Arjun said, looking at a remaining patch of water on the inside of his arm.  It seemed to be evaporating faster than he expected, the shine shrinking in.  But that was the world they lived in now: everything going, going, gone.

He was surprised when she hugged him.

There was a smudge of dust behind her ear that he thought he might be imagining—a relic of the attempt to wash without water that she probably hadn’t made.  She smelled harsh, like the paint.  He didn’t remember the name of the perfume his mother had worn although when he closed his eyes he could almost see the bottle.  Small, with a round crystal stopper; dark glass the color of red wine.

* * *

 He traveled on foot because he was in no hurry and because the streets were sometimes still clogged with unmoved cars.  Sometimes heavy-bodied bluebottle flies buzzed avidly around them and Arjun always hurried past those, careful not to look.  He didn’t know why the remaining bodies were so scattershot.  Why empty one car but not the one next to it?  Had the self-assigned gravedigger just gotten tired, or buried only the people they knew, or only the cars with unlocked doors?  Had they chosen by some eenie-meenie process he couldn’t guess at?  And why had someone thickly sprayed one car, a black Jeep Wrangler, with a sticky-smelling pine air freshener even though it seemed empty and undisturbed, its owner not dead but Lost?

It was near the black Jeep Wrangler where he stopped for the night because a young man with harshly-cut, straw-colored hair came out onto his porch facing the road Arjun was walking on and said, “Do you want dinner?”

“Sure,” Arjun said.

He followed the guy inside.

“You’re not a Deadliner,” the guy said—he didn’t tilt up his voice but he gave Arjun a curious, assessing look, like he really did need an answer to the question he hadn’t actually asked.

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Lucky you.  Bunch of fucking animals.”  The guy started setting the table, which he did with a pristineness that surprised Arjun a little—somehow it didn’t seem to fit the house with all its neon beer signs and badly crocheted doilies.  Maybe it had been his parents’ house—he looked like he might have been at college.  Or maybe he had just seized it, like a property in a Monopoly game, and had never lived there before at all.

The guy said, “I’m Eric, by the way.”

“Arjun.”

“You eat meat? Beef?”

He nodded.  “Just not pork.”

“So halal.”

“But, like, really laid-back,” Arjun said.  “I eat Jell-O.”  _And I drink_ , he almost added, but he’d been dead-sober ever since the Loss, as if being a better Muslim would bring his family back to him, as if his mother’s complaints had somehow marked him as unworthy of their company.

“So halal with shitty taste,” Eric said.  “Got it.”  He went on scrutinizing Arjun.  “What are you, sixteen, seventeen?”

“Sixteen.”  His birthday had been two months ago.  He wouldn’t have called it a celebration.  “You?”

“Twenty.  I was studying Chinese.”  He had an unnervingly beautiful smile that cut across his chiseled, sunburned face and softened it.  “Chinese was the most widely spoken language in the world, did you know that?  But the statistics on that might have changed—you can flip a coin a hundred times and get all heads and it’s just as likely as a fifty-fifty split.  Who knows how many people went missing from which places when they haven’t finished that goddamn census yet.  Anyway, over a billion people spoke Chinese, a sixth of the world’s population.  You and I, Arjun, we’re going to have kids and they’re going to think those numbers are imaginary—six billion people?  To them, it’ll seem like seventy bajillion.  The two concepts will be exactly the same.”

Only if the kids couldn’t do math, Arjun thought, because there was a difference between not being able to emotionally grasp something and not knowing what it meant, but that seemed like a shitty quibble.  And he didn’t want kids anyway.

Instead of answering Eric, Arjun said, “What’s a Deadliner?”

Eric began fixing hamburgers—“Relax,” he said, “my parents had a quarter of a cow in their freezer-chest and the power wasn’t out here for that long, it kept okay.  You’ll be e. coli free”—and Arjun settled in to watch him.  He leaned back against the kitchen table, the ugly vanilla wood edge of it pressing into the base of his spine, and watched Eric like Eric was a movie.  Eric sprinkled salt.  He flicked water on the heating skillet.  Arjun knew he should have offered to make a salad, but he felt tired and dusty and unwilling to be anything but an audience.

“The Deadliners,” Eric said, “have decided that there’s no point in believing in a tomorrow.  They don’t develop attachments—they won’t even stay in one place for too long—they just wander around.  They won’t pay for anything.  They won’t even carry sleeping bags because if they do, that means they think there will be a night.  They just sleep wherever they are and eat whatever they come across when they’re hungry.”  He began flipping the burgers.  There was a dark shadow of sweat at the small of his back, making his white shirt appealingly translucent.

“So—nihilistic, feral cat people.”

Eric laughed.  “Pretty much.”

So many clubs you could join, even now.  So many ways to not be like everybody else.  He felt soured on them now—those grapes just out of his reach—and all he could think of was people going around with pins on their jackets.  _I am sadder than you.  I am smarter than you._ Like post-apocalyptic Mad Libs, he thought, and he bit his lip to keep from laughing.

“If I’d been one, would you still have had me to dinner?”

“No,” Eric said, “because I wouldn’t have wanted to eat with you.  But I’d have put something out on the porch for you.”  He hesitated.  “Probably.”

The burgers were good, if plain, with no frills but American cheese and squirts of ketchup, and no sides but some vinegary leftover coleslaw Eric shoveled out of a foil-wrapped bowl in his fridge.  Arjun didn’t know what business he had been choosy about his dinner when he’d been planning to just make a peanut butter sandwich in a deserted grocery store, but then he thought of Neil, Neil and his scrambled eggs that had a month before been baked potatoes and a hellish month before that been black licorice, Neil and his pickiness and his whining, and his throat seemed to close up.  He put his fork down and stared at his plate, at the little smears and crumbs.  It all suddenly revolted him.  Being alive, being present—it was so messy.  The Lost were neat.  They’d been so cleanly cut out of the world, out of their tangled-up webs of their lives.  Seventy bajillion people.

* * *

 It always made Arjun feel a little better that he didn’t look like Peter Houston-Chen.  Peter: forever eleven, white, and wispy-haired.  Arjun: nineteen (only for now), Indian, and with a mop of thick curls.

He thought about that while he washed up dishes that night.  He’d made French toast—one of his specialties (he had exactly four specialties, none of them that impressive)—and the kids, their hair still wet, had gobbled it up, chattering all the while.  Nobody would have known they’d just come from their brother’s grave.  Elizabeth and Susan just picked at their food, Elizabeth’s hand on Susan’s, their fingers intertwined.

Arjun had never had a boyfriend.  He was transfixed by the little gestures of intimacy—Elizabeth’s thumb stroking down the span of Susan’s knuckles—like he’d have to pass a test on them someday.

Finally it was just the three of them, two adults and one quasi-adult, two parents and one not-son.

“How was it?” Arjun said, purposefully vague.  She could just talk about the lake if she wanted.

“You should come with us next time,” Elizabeth said.  She rubbed her eyes, which were deep-set and always looked bruised, like she’d never gotten a good night’s sleep in her life.

“I didn’t know you were going.”

“Then next time we’ll wait for you.”  She carried her plate over to the sink.  “I know you never met him, but sometimes one grave can stand in for another.”

 _Grave_ , he knew, was a euphemism—they’d had nothing to bury and not enough stone for all the markers.  Peter Houston-Chen was commemorated somewhere in Darien by a wooden cross or a paperweight or a single brick in a wall.  He had worked with an organization back home to acknowledge his own family; it had all been very professional there.  They were falsely immortal, their names painted in this art installation, a massive empty house: Deepika on a stair railing, his mom on a headboard, his dad on the blade of a ceiling fan, Neal on one shiny silver side of a toaster.  Like they were all home.  Arjun knew that someday somebody would burn that house down and good fucking riddance to it.

“Sure,” Arjun said.  It sounded like his voice was full of stones grating against each other.

Elizabeth put her hand between his shoulder blades, right against the long slide of his spine.  She smelled like lake-water.  Arjun slumped forward against the counter, his hands down in the soapsuds, his fingers going bloodless as he pressed hard against the stainless steel bottom of the sink.  Elizabeth had been a therapist, before, and she was some kind of minister now, her denomination, as she said, “whatever church we want to squat in this week.”  She had the kind of infuriating serenity of a saint.  He loved her but sometimes he wanted to rip his own skin off to get away from the weight of her quiet, placid understanding.

She could sense it, too.  She kissed the back of his head and said, “Okay, I’ll go be insightful somewhere else.  Leave me some dishes, I feel like your whole day has been errands and chores.”  She disappeared to go play with the kids.

Arjun said to Susan, “Was she always like that?  So understanding you just want her to shut up?”

“A little.”  She was examining the kitchen table painting, dry now but still unfinished.  “Do you think the Loss brought out who we really were, kiddo, or do you think it’s all just a roll of the dice, who gets shattered and who gets whole?”

Kiddo?  He’d let it go once.  “That sounds like a question for Elizabeth.”  He wasn’t going to stand there with Dawn all over his hands talking about philosophy when his whole body felt cramped inside.  _We are out of bad luck._ No, he thought, no, they were just out of luck entirely, out of the realm of it, they were through chance and into fate.

He dried his hands and one of the plates.  He’d made extra French toast and fruit salad, and he piled it up, careful to drizzle the syrup so it only settled on the toast without spilling off onto the fruit.  Not that that balancing trick would work once he started walking.

“I’m just going to—”  He nodded at the door.

“Right, right.”  She waved him on.  “But I’ll expect deep philosophical ponderings when you get back.”

“Don’t threaten me,” he said, and she laughed.

He went out onto the porch with the plate balanced on his forearm; he’d never waited tables, but he just felt like it had a certain kind of flair to it.  He watched for a while until he saw someone coming.

There weren’t always travelers, especially at night, but their house overlooked one of the better-cleared roads; you could watch for the Deadliners, dirty-faced and sore-footed, struggling up the hill.  He was better now at identifying them—they were thinner than other people, bonier and sharper-edged, and somehow by their look you could tell that they weren’t walking _to_ anything.

He knew why Eric had hated them.  They were self-centered even in their slow suicides, thinking the world would end because their own worlds had, probably thinking it should rain whenever they cried; Arjun hated them sometimes himself.  But he couldn’t get over their eyes, these massive craters that swallowed up their faces, as if hunger had starved them down to being nothing but that stare, not dead-eyed but all too alive: _is it over yet?  Is it done?_

He only ever waited ten minutes—after that, he always just left the plate.  But sometimes the Deadliners would talk to you as they clawed at whatever you were giving them and he always felt like he was supposed to hear something from them, though he didn’t know what.  But it was like there had been an arrow going through his whole life, pinning memories together, bringing everything forward to this particular target.  Maybe even to this particular night, he thought dizzily.  He looked up at the stars until the blood rushed to the back of his head and made him feel like he was falling.

He was just about to turn around and go in when he saw the woman.

She didn’t look like she was dying, but she did look like her feet were hurting her; she moved with a draggy determination, hauling herself forward, her jaw tight.  White, maybe in her thirties, though it was hard to tell in the shadows.  Arjun came forward off the porch, holding up the plate so that it would gleam in the streetlights and she would see it.

“Hey!  I’ve got food if you’re hungry!”

The woman looked over at him.  She had a birdlike alertness that made him think she’d wind up running from him, but she came right over, steady-limbed and unafraid.

She thanked him in a very reasonable tone of voice.  Not a Deadliner, then.  Too purposeful, too polite.

“You always do this?” she said, putting a piece of melon in her mouth.  She sat down beside him on the stoop.  “This is really good, by the way.”

“Thanks.  And generally, yeah, I see if there’s anyone coming by who wants a meal.  Nine times out of ten, there isn’t, and I just wind up leaving it for the animals.”  The loose cats and dogs were still around—he’d keep an eye out for Rufus—and Arjun had started getting bags of kibble as well, for the nights when those free-range pets had their food taken by a passerby.  He’d fill the bowls once the woman was gone.

“That’s nice of you,” the woman said.  She ate quickly.

“Do you need a place to stay?”

“No, thanks.  I shouldn’t be in a hurry, really, but I am—I just want to get through.  I had a car a while back, but—”  She shrugged, the universal symbol of frustrated post-Loss drivers everywhere.

“Where are you going?”

She put the fork and knife down, neatly crossing them into an X across the plate.  “Mapleton, New York.”

He’d never heard of it.

He made a little more conversation with her for a while—Susan, hearing them chat, came out for a minute and offered the woman some replacement sneakers since the soles of her own were flapping a little.  It would save her from having to detour to a mall, she said.  The woman said, “Yeah, I never liked shopping,” in a matter-of-fact, normal way that made Arjun laugh.  The shoes fit.

After she was gone, Arjun filled up the kibble bowls—one of the cats butted its head against his legs with an aggrieved _meow_ , as if to ask why he’d waited so long—and he went back inside.

He felt like he’d washed up again, like the water in the sink had been tied to the water at the mosque, and even now, he seemed to feel it on him, a tingle of relief.  He would have to go back for the towels, he decided; they had a washer and dryer, there was no reason to just let them sit and get mildewy.  He needed to believe in tomorrow.

“What did you ask me before I went out there?”

“I forget,” Susan said.  “Which makes me feel very, very old.”  She was getting out her paints again and sitting back down.  He'd never gotten the appeal of abstract art.  It looked like a mess of yarn.

Arjun said, “Am I in that?”

“Of course,” Susan said, and when she showed him what was meant to be him, it looked nothing like him at all, but just enough like everything that was around it that he could see the family resemblance.  Even between the paint and the unpainted table there was a certain something, like the wood grain had made its own portrait long before they had come along.  All of it fitting together.


End file.
